Heart of the Matter #32: Breads - Sweet and Savory

I don’t know about all of you, but I love the holiday season. It’s like a food-lover’s dream – the possibilities for making and eating delicious food are blissfully endless. I spend hours pouring over every food-themed magazine I can find and picking out all the cookie recipes and other fun foods that I want to make this holiday season…this year? Eggnog and a yule log...wow, that even rhymes. Plus, I’d love to hold a cookie exchange with my friends this year. Do you have anything you’re hoping to make this month?

The holidays are a perfect time of year for this month’s Heart of the Matter theme, “Breads: Sweet and Savory.” There are so many kinds of breads that go perfectly with the cooler weather that we’re getting here…warm, yeasty boules filled with herbs and crackled crusts, sweet loaves packed with tart cranberries and ginger to be eaten with tea, sticky rolls for breakfast…it will be a challenging just choosing what kind of a bread to make! And yes, believe it or not, we get cooler weather here in Hawaii! Along with lots of winter rain…and last week, it even snowed on Mauna Kea, the huge volcano that is on the Big Island! Even my hometown in Colorado is in the holiday spirit, getting decked out for a white Christmas with nearly 10 inches of snow coming in today!

So this month, send in your entry for a sweet or a savory bread (or heck, go wild and do both!). And of course it should please be heart-healthy too: your entry should be low in saturated fats (ie. not too much butter!), be low in salt (sodium), and if you'd like, abundant with vegetables or herbs or fruit. If you want to get more information, check out our useful links in the right hand marginal. Please only use your entry for this event so that we can keep things centred on heart-healthy recipes and please link to the event as well. Send your entries to me at phillipslayden AT gmail DOT com before (your) midnight Thursday, December 31, and please put "HotM" in your subject line so I can keep track of all the entries! ;) I'll post the round-up on January 1st so that we can all eat these healthy breads as part of our healthy new year's resolutions!

HotM #31 the roundup

It is time to post the HotM roundup, small but good! The theme for November was Retro and we got some really nice entries from some lovely ladies:

First we have labelga from Leafy Cooking who not only made a classic Kugelhopf but also baked it in a retro ceramic dish for Armistice Day.

Soma of eCurry gives us a delicious Machher Jhal/Fish in Spicy Sauce, a dish she used to see her mother and grandmother cook and she also gives us her story about it. Click over and read it!

Sorshe Begun (Baby brinjals in mustard & yoghurt gravy) is the tasty dish that Indrani of Appyayan sent me, it is a dish that her mother makes and she is still trying to make it the way her mother does it but it seems as if her mother's got the magic touch when it comes to Sorshe Begun!

Aparna from My Diverse Kitchen serves a dish that is more of a way of cooking vegetables than a specific dish itself and she has seen generations of women cook this way! Her Parippu Potta Beans Kari (French Beans With Lentils) are definitley worth trying!

I made Sweet Couscous With Pink Grapefruit and Pink Pepper and Michelle, who have had technical problems, will be posting her entry, Turkey Bacon Rumaki, as soon as she can!

Finally got my problems figured out (sort of...). Here is my retro dish - Healthy Rumaki a la Hawaii - turkey bacon wrapped around water chestnuts and pineapple, marinated in a semi-sweet, salty sauce. The recipe can be found on my blog, The Accidental Scientist. See you all next month!

Thank you again ladies, I really enjoyed dining with you!